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A New Story

I peered into amber eyes and heard a sequence of carefully chosen words fall from a woman’s mouth:

“We might say that something of global significance is happening here with respect to the consciousness of people.”

I was talking to Karen Litfin, a gentle woman with graying hair, and a professor of political science at the University of Washington. For the past few years, with visits to India, Sri Lanka, Italy, and Scotland, Karen has become something of an expert on the Ecovillage. As a political scientist, she has analyzed ecovillages worldwide, from rural villages in Africa to technologically powered urban communities in Los Angeles and Berlin. She’s written a book about her experiences in ecovillages around the world, Ecovillages: Lessons for Sustainable Community, and is especially curious about the intersection of ecology, economics, consciousness, and culture–the combination she calls E2C2–that she’s seen modeled in ecovillages worldwide.

The ecovillage models a new story, a story of global significance. In this story, the web of life is sacred, and life is lived, more or less, in cooperation. Click below to listen to the ecovillage story, a combination of her experience and my own. For more about Litfin’s work with ecovillages, visit her website at http://ecovillagebook.org/

Builders of the Dawn

Builders of the Dawn is a radio series focusing on sustainability, right livelihood, and the emerging cooperative culture. It spotlights a region, the Klamath-Siskiyou range in southern Oregon and northern California, to showcase individuals who are making changes in their lives to make bigger changes in the world. These people, farmers, educators, permaculture teachers, ecologists, musicians, and activists are working to reconnect themselves to each other, to the wider web of life, and to the Earth. They are actively living a new story, building a culture of cooperation. Builders of the Dawn is produced by Ariel Blackbird for KAOS 89.3 FM Olympia.